... I can't say it better than Chris Kromm, director of the liberal Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, North Carolina. "For Democrats to turn their back on a region that half of all African-Americans and a growing number of Latinos call home, a place devastated by Hurricane Katrina, plant closings, poverty and other indignities -- in short, for progressives to give up on the very place where they could argue they are needed most -- would rightfully be viewed as a historic retreat from the party's commitment to justice for all."

Panda's Thumb: Evolutionary neutrality, the proliferation of traits that don't affect survivability one way or the other, fits in with natural selection perfectly well. Haeckel's error continues to provide fodder for un-Intelligent Design proponents. A happy Darwin day book review.

... Two and a half years later, Indonesia's bird-flu problem has evolved into the region's worst with no clear plan to change direction. Jakarta officially only offers poultry farmers half the going market rate for H5N1-positive fowl killed as part of government culls, providing a strong disincentive for grassroots farmers to report infections in their flocks. Worse, there have been widespread reports that many Indonesian farmers have not received the compensation promised by the central government from provincial authorities. ...

BoomanTribune: A look at the horror of US prisons would indicate to any sane person that this country should never have been allowed to manage prisons in any other part of the world. What is it exactly, besides the ExxonMobil money, about global warming deniers that allows them to so fully suspend rational thought when confronted with scientific evidence? A catastrophic era of nuclear wars would be the most probable result of a US strike on Iran.